Servant (CORBA)

A servant, in CORBA, is the invocation target containing methods for handling the remote method invocations. In the newer CORBA versions, the remote object on the server side is split into the object (that is exposed to remote invocations) and servant (to which the former part delegates the method calls). It can be one servant per remote object, or the same servant can support several (possibly all) objects, associated with the given Portable Object Adapter. The servant for each object can be set or found "once and forever" (servant activation) or dynamically chosen each time the method on that object is invoked (servant location). Both servant locator and servant activator can forward the calls to another server. In total, this system provides a very powerful means to balance the load, distributing requests between several machines.

In the object oriented languages, both remote object and its servant are objects from the viewpoint of the object oriented programming.